Plain Kate (16 page)

Drina didn’t answer at once. The two girls sat listening to Cream cropping grass, her tail swishing.

“They were twins,” said Drina at last. “My mother and my uncle. Lenore and Linay. He was my favorite, my other father. He taught me little magics, and how to turn handsprings. He was different, after she died. After that spell, with his shadow—after he summoned her. The clan spoke death to him. He went alone. I remember watching him walk down the road.”

It was full dark now. The trees were stirring and rustling. Nearby a nightjar churred, an eerie whirr that seemed to come from everywhere. Drina traced the lines of the carving’s wooden face. “Plain Kate, you didn’t know her, you don’t understand. She would never have done this.” She was crying. “What you’re saying—the rusalka—it can’t be true.”

“We have ample evidence,” said Taggle. “Scars and stuff, even.”

“But my father,” said Drina desperately. “He was different before she died. She loved him. How can it be that she killed him? Her own husband? And, and—Ciri!” The name burst from her. “Stivo, Wen, and Ciri! Kate, she would never have hurt Ciri. She would have died first.”

“She did,” said Taggle.

“Hush, Taggle.” Kate patted at Drina’s bunched shoulders, awkward as if patting a horse. “Drina. She doesn’t have a choice. Linay, he said it was a terrible fate. That’s why he’s doing all this. He wants to save her.”

Drina sniffed hard and swallowed. “Save her?”

“A rusalka’s fate…” Kate tried to remember the exact words. “He said a rusalka’s fate could be undone by avenging her death. That’s what he wants to do. That’s why he wants to kill all the people in Lov.”

“Undone…” Drina’s eyes were huge. “What does that mean? Would it…bring her back?”

Kate felt as if Drina had kicked her in the belly. Would Drina be on Linay’s side? Lenore had been her mother. Kate had lost her father. What would she do to save him? To stop Linay, would she have to fight Drina?

But Drina fought herself. She grabbed Kate’s hand and squeezed so hard that Kate’s fingers ached. “We can’t let him do this, Plain Kate. My mother wouldn’t want—we have to stop him.”

Kate laced her fingers through Drina’s. She could barely see them in the dark: walnut brown and new pine pale, like a pattern of inlay. “Yes,” she said. “You can come with me.”

¶

So Plain Kate and Drina went together down the road to Lov. Whatever had been between them—the lopsided friendship of Drina’s merriness and Kate’s cautious silences—was gone now, hacked off, burned away. But something new had grown in its place, a bond as strong as a scar. They did not speak of it, and they made the best time they could.

Riding in the
vardo
was easier than walking, though not much faster: The wall of fog trailed them, relentless. Still, Kate recovered some strength, nodding and dozing on Drina’s shoulder as they sat together on the driver’s seat, high above Cream’s back. Neither girl was willing to ride alone beside Behjet’s helpless body.

The broad road, which Kate had walked for three days, was on the other bank of the river.

On this side of the river, the way was hardly more than a track, winding through birch groves and boggy patches of basket rush and purple aster—a strangely peaceful place.

“We wanted to take the small road,” Drina explained. “The great road was jammed—the whole country, and the people are angry. They…” She paused, looking as if she might be sick.

“I saw.” Kate thought of the hanged women, their black feet brushing her shoulders as she ducked away.

“They’re going to Lov,” said Drina. “The
gadje
farmers in this country always hide themselves in the stone city when there’s trouble. Since the time of the dragon boats, Daj says. They will all go to Lov.”

And they’ll die,
thought Kate.
Unless we can stop Linay.

But talk as they would, they had no idea of how to stop him. Finally on the third day, in the last of the light, the little track broke free of a wall of birch and joined a larger road that bridged the river. Snakes of fog eddied on top of the water, and the overcast had half swallowed the rising moon. Across the river, Lov squatted, cold as a toad.

¶

They could not go the last mile—it was nearly full dark—so they turned Cream around and nosed the
vardo
back into the shelter of the trees. Branches scraped the canvas sides. They found a little rise by the river and took shelter in a grove of young birch. Drina tended to Behjet. They built a little fire.

Across the river, the city muttered to itself in the damp darkness. “It’s big,” said Drina. “I forgot how big it was.”

Kate worked on her carving, smoothing life into wood with a leather pad wetted and dipped into sand. It was nearly finished, and she knew, she knew it was good, it was true, it was important. But whatever it was saying to her, she couldn’t hear.

Cream was shouldering her way into the grove, tangling her mane in the low branches. Drina got up and set her free, then got out the softest brush and started to curry the horse’s neck. Taggle climbed into Kate’s lap. “You could do that for me, you know.” So Kate put down her sanding pad and the speechless, useless carving and scratched her fingernails through his dense ruff.

Beside Kate the firelight crinkled on the water. It was going right through her. “My shadow,” she said. “He can’t make the monster without my shadow. We have to get it back.”

“You tried that,” the cat pointed out. “I had to act heroically in order to save you.” He sat up, even though she was still petting him. “Develop a better plan.”

Kate did her best to obey. The river murmured at her elbow, and the fog on it carried bursts of other voices, high laughter and thick shouts, and for a moment a snatch of eerie fiddle music. “He’s here,” said Kate. Drina came to sit beside her. They listened but the music didn’t come again.

“I don’t know how to stop him,” said Kate. “I never have.”

The words hung there a moment. Then Taggle said, “Why do we have to stop him?”

Drina began: “Because my mother—”

“Bah. She’s dead. Her wishes are of no importance.”

“Taggle.” Kate put a silencing hand between his ears—and found little ridges of muscle, alert, tense.

“Give me another reason,” Taggle said, flicking his ears. “Give me a
cat’s
reason. Keep in mind that we do not,” he harrumphed, “run into burning buildings going ‘bark, bark.’ ”

“It’s—” Kate struggled to explain. “It’s a city. Thousands and thousands of people.”

“Bah,” said the cat again, but very softly. He was looking at his toes.

“You saved me,” she reminded him. “On the boat. And Linay almost killed you. Did you have a cat’s reason?”

“I’m fond of you.”

“And you’re more than a cat.”

Kate smoothed her thumb along Taggle’s eyebrow whiskers, trying to soothe him, but he lifted a paw and batted her hand away. He stood up. “There is something else we could do.”

Something in his voice, the way his coat rose just slightly over his tight muscles, made Kate’s scars prickle. “Taggle,” she whispered. “What is it?”

“He gave me words, when he took your shadow. If we break the gift, we break the magic. Your shadow would no longer be his to use. The creature he made would come apart.”

“You mean,” said Drina, “you could just stop talking?”

“Oh, no,” said Kate. “No.”

Taggle shook his head, humanwise. “My mind is full of words. I
think
in them. It has changed who I am. That’s the magic, not the talking.”

“Then what—”

Taggle looked up at her, his amber eyes deep as the loneliness Kate had felt before he became her friend. “The traditional thing,” he said slowly, “involves the river and a sack.”

“No,” said Kate. “No.”

“It’s your wish, though,” said Taggle implacably. “To save the city. All those thousands and thousands.”

“It’s
not
—” Kate found tears stinging her eyes. She batted them away angrily. The three of them sat staring at one another.

“Drina: If I die, Linay will lose Katerina’s shadow. I am right, am I not?”

But even Kate knew he was. It was the first rule of magic: the exchange of gifts. Cream leaned over and tried to eat Drina’s hair. The Roamer girl nodded to Taggle and turned and flung her arms around the horse’s neck.

“There’s another way to stop him,” said Kate. Her voice had gone hard as oak root. “He can’t do his spell if he’s dead.”

Drina whipped around. “Kate!”

“Yes,” she said, standing up. “We have to kill him.”

“He’s my—” Drina began to object, and stopped. They were all standing now, facing one another, and only the horse was calm.

“I
like
this plan,” said Taggle, spreading his toes. “It is much better than the other plan. This is what I think we should do. We should find him and kill him in his sleep.”

Linay, who could move in a blink, who had struck Taggle down with an uplifted finger. Kate said nothing, but Taggle read her face. “It’s true he’s large prey,” said the cat, “but you are missing the genius of my plan: the sleeping part. The finding-him part should be easy because we know where he’s going.”

“I can’t,” whispered Drina. “He taught me to swim.”

“Taggle…” Kate hesitated—and decided. “How?”

“You can carve,” he said. “Do that. Skin is softer than wood.”

Kate thought of the hanged women with the hexes carved on their hands. “I am not sure I can.”

“Become sure,” said the cat, his eyes flashing green in the firelight. “Once you leap on a boar’s back, you can’t sheathe your claws.”

“Even if—” said Drina. “He’s strong, or he was.”

“He still is.” Kate’s wrist still ached when she thought of Linay’s hands.

“Listen,” said Taggle. “There’s something on the road.”

Through the swaying trunks of the birch trees, light danced and flared. In a moment they could see men coming up the forest track, a party of men with torches. They were all dressed the same, in dark clothes with a yellow patch on the chest, and on that was embroidered a red boat beneath crossed oars. One even carried a flag. Kate had never seen uniforms before, but she knew what they were.

In the torchlight their faces were pale. Kate saw the dark pits of eyes turn their way. The girls drew close together. Cream stamped and snorted. But the men didn’t stop.

Drina was so close that Kate could feel the beat of her. “Soldiers,” she whispered. “The city guard.”

The cat had melted away into the darkness. In another moment he was back. “They go across the bridge. To the city.”

“They’re the ones—” said Drina. “They came for my mother.”

They stood looking out across the river. The city stirred restlessly in its sleep, sent them snatches of sound and flares of light. “This is too big,” said Drina. “We can’t do this.”

“Yes, we can,” said Kate, who suddenly saw how. “We’ll tell the guard…” She trailed off as the implications came to her, but braced herself and went on: “We’ll go to the guard and tell them he’s a witch. We’ll turn him in.”

Drina stood and Kate saw her start to shake as she too thought it through. “They’ll burn him.”

“Yes,” said Kate. “I know.”

¶

They couldn’t speak after that, but somehow they slept, tight together in the
vardo
, with Behjet’s limp hand dangling down and resting on Kate’s back. That was uncomfortable, but a comfort too: Linay had killed. In drawing the rusalka, he’d murdered half the countryside. He’d killed Behjet, or nearly: The man’s skin was drawn across his skull like a drumhead, and he smelled of death. Linay had done that. He had killed the women hanging from the trees, the plowboy in the poppies, killed Stivo and Wen and little Ciri, and hundreds of others. He deserved whatever the city guard would do to him.

But he didn’t,
said Kate’s little thoughts,
because no one did.

And I helped him. What do I deserve?

She slept in fits and nightmares and woke just after dawn. Overnight, the weather had changed. The endless fog and drizzle had pulled itself up, and clouds crouched above them, low, green-black, rounded like the backs of river boulders: hail clouds that sent down swirls of cold air. Thin twilight slanted under them.

Lov looked bigger by daylight. Its huge walls were a muddy gray. Roofs and squat spires rose above them, tiled in slate the same color as the clouds. The whole city steamed and smoked in the chilly morning like fresh manure. Kate looked at it as she greased her feet and pulled on her socks. The road was muddy, and having enough socks that one pair would always be dry was the only way to keep your feet from rotting. She was glad she stolen Linay’s.

Linay.

Drina came out of the
vardo
. Her chopped hair stuck out in all directions; it made her look older, ravaged. Kate could see the slice in her ear; it had healed almost black with scar. Drina winced from her gaze and turned away, binding up her hair in a dark turban. Her long thin shadow stretched blue among those of the birches.

Then Taggle came back from his morning ablutions, dragging a half-dead, spitting mink. “Today,” Kate told him. “Today I’m going to kill someone.”

“I can live with that,” drawled the cat.

¶

They had to leave the
vardo
. There was a fee, Drina said, to take a wagon into Lov, and they couldn’t pay it. Kate found her old pack-basket and filled it with what food they had, extra socks, and the blue cloth with the stars to cover her patchy hair. Drina washed Behjet and tried to feed him broth. She couldn’t: He had stopped swallowing. Tears sprang up in Drina’s eyes but she said nothing, just set the broth down at Behjet’s hand, and went out to tend to Cream. Taggle killed the mink and cleaned his whiskers like a gentleman. And then they went.

The city of Lov stood on a hump in the marshland. The Narwe, like a great moat, guarded three sides. From behind, the city looked peaceful: reeds like brushstrokes on the square stones, a town of storks nested among them. The huge white birds stalked slowly through the dark water.

A canal came out of the river and went into the city through a metal grille. A pool at the base of the wall was jammed with small boats of all descriptions. Among them was a little green barge, painted and carved in the Roamer fashion. Taggle pointed with one paw, looking like a human trapped in the skin of a cat. “He’s here.”

They stood looking, silent. Then they crossed the bridge where the river road joined the great road, and rounded the flank of Lov.

The huge gate was shut. And from it, like guts from a rabbit, spilled another city, a field of tents and hovels. The road vanished into a stew of mud and worse things. Flies swarmed, slow in the morning chill.

Kate had grown used to being only with people who knew about her shadow. She felt the sidelong, prickly stares of the refugees, eyeing her burns, trying to pin down exactly what about her looked so strange. Drina tugged at her turban, tucking up the ragged ends of her hair. Taggle, though, sat up straight as he balanced on Kate’s basket, proud and fine as a king.

They pushed their way into the crowd, into the shadow of the great wall. It took them an hour to go no farther than they could have thrown a stone, three hours to get anywhere near the gate.

Suddenly the cat stiffened on Kate’s shoulder, and leapt. He went by her ear as yowl and claw, and landed on the back of a white-haired peddler a few paces ahead. The stooped man straightened and whirled, his white zupan and white braids flying around him, while the crowd grumbled and snickered and Kate shouted, without meaning to: “Linay!”

The magician’s eyes caught hers, but only for an instant. He was busy trying to prevent the hissing, snarling cat from shredding his throat. Kate couldn’t quite see what happened next, but Taggle came flying back at her like a tossed ball. She scrambled to catch him as he slid down her front and landed with a wet smack in the churned muck at her feet. Blood ran down Linay’s neck and scratches covered his hands.

“Well, well.” Linay bowed to them. “Fair maid of the wood. Far from home. And Drina—how you’ve grown.”

“Mira,”
said Drina. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what?” Linay looked around him, owl-eyed as if innocent. “I seek entrance to the city.”

“You want to destroy it,” snapped Kate. That drew a few eyes—but only a few. The people of the abandoned country had no love in that moment for the stone city with its shut gates, and no time to listen to the ravings of a stranger.

Linay took a step toward them. Kate could smell the wild herbs on him. He spoke with a small smile. “And what are you going to do about it, Little Stick?”

“We’re going to stop you.”

“Are you now?” He was almost in arm’s reach. The stormy light made his white face greenish. “My dear ones. I wish you could. I almost wish you could.” He lifted his chin—it was Drina’s chin, Kate saw, the same haughty gesture. “Come, then. Let me see you try.”

Kate started to lunge at him.

Linay lifted a single finger. The air turned to glass. Kate was caught in the invisible magic, breathless, helpless—and still no one even bothered to look. Linay reached out and touched her cheek. “Good-bye, Katerina,” he said. And then he turned his back on them and shouldered deeper into the shoving crowd.

¶

“That was foolish,” Kate hissed at Taggle, when he had climbed back onto her shoulder. “He might have killed you!”

“And I might have killed him,” muttered the cat. “Which would have saved us some trouble. I don’t think we have long. There is something in the air.”

There was. Kate had grown used to the wall of fog that had trailed her all the way down the road to Lov, but now there was a wall of storm. Beyond the crowd, a cloud seemed to rise from the ground, bruise-black and solid-seeming as a mountain range. It was creeping toward them, and slowly the crowd was turning to watch it. It breathed hail-cold on their turning faces.

The cloud was driving people toward the gate like sheep to the slaughter pens. The crowd became elbows and backs, feet treading on feet and the close human stench of fear. A noise rose from it, a many-throated rumble and roar.

Through it all went Linay, threading forward like a chisel down the wood grain. Without the split he opened, Kate thought, they would not have been able to move at all. But there was something about him—a thundering, haunted power—that made people inch aside even when there was not an inch to spare. And so they were able to follow him, keeping his narrow, bleeding back in sight. And soon the gate loomed.

A clump of towers bulged from the city wall, bigger than the tithe barn at Toila, bigger than anything Kate had ever seen. In the center of the towers a tunnel gaped, with a huge gate for teeth. Behind the gate were dark-dressed city guardsmen, with the red boats on their chests like second mouths. They had pikes. Here it was: her moment. Kate stopped.

As she paused, an icy swirl of wind lifted her hair. Fat drops splattered here and there, and squalls tugged at hems and hats. The crowd moaned in fear and surged forward, smashing together. Taggle’s claws skittered on her shoulder and she lost track of Drina. Kate was flung against the broad back of the man in front of her, and for a moment she could see only his sheepskin coat. And then she heard Linay shouting in a voice like a string that was about to snap: “Look!” he shouted. “Behold, the fate of Lov!”

People froze; the crush eased. Kate could move again, and she wormed her way sideways until she could see what was happening. There was a wagon smashed against one of the gate towers. Linay was standing on top of the wreck like a stork on a stump, holding a knife, and shouting.

“I did this!” His voice was high and half singing. “I drew the rain and the sleep across the whole country. I am a witch and I curse this city.” He threw his arms open. Blood was running from both wrists. “Lov: I show you horrors! Sister: Come to me!”

And from the green cloud, something came.

It was the monster he had shown her, the rusalka with a shadow, a thing made of wings and howling. It struck into the crowd.

Kate grabbed Taggle off her shoulder, folded herself up around him, and covered her head as the crowd exploded into panic and screaming. Toward the gate, away from it, in all directions, people pushed and staggered and ran. The blows of their rushing feet rained across her back and sides. Again she felt the monster’s wing beats thundering overhead.

Then, sudden as they’d come, the wings folded and were gone; Kate felt them go. An eerie, moaning silence fell. It was so still that for a moment Kate could hear the sparse, cold drops of rain tocking into the mud around her. She lifted her head cautiously. The cat squirmed out from under her. Drina, turban gone and one eye swelling, crept back to her side.

The two girls were on the edge of a circle of—

They had been bodies. But they were crumbling, falling apart like rot-riddled wood. It was hard to tell even how many: a dozen? They made a ring of blackish mush, an open space between them and the gate. On the other side of it, Linay was still standing on the shattered wagon, panting and folded with effort, an ugly grin on his pallid face.

Kate was just getting to her feet when the great gate of Lov screeched open. The portcullis came up a few feet and the pikemen ducked under, slashing at the air to hold back the crowd. With them came another man in the city’s colors, with a gray-shot beard and a broad red sash and a huge hat: a grand man, who looked, just then, sick with fear. “Witch!” he shouted up to Linay. “Why do you disturb the peace of Lov?”

Lina barked a disbelieving laugh.
“The peace of Lov?!”

Half the crowd shouted back at him, and Linay whirled around and silenced them with a look, his eyes flashing like pearls. He turned back to the gray-faced, gray-bearded man, who said, “What’s your business?”

“Death is my business,” said Linay. “I’m a witch, after all. Take me off to be burned, please.” He hopped neatly down—the pikemen winced—and held his hands out for lashing. The crowd roared and pushed forward again. Kate and Drina were shoved as if by a tidal wave, into the open space where the rusalka had struck. Kate staggered and fell—Taggle flew from her shoulder—she had a moment’s horror about the stuff she was falling
into
—and she found herself in familiar arms.